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BY JONATHAN LERNER

Diego Gonzalez was driving through San Pedro Garza García, the poshest municipality in metropolitan Monterrey, one of the richest cities in Mexico. “When I was a kid, in the 1970s,” he said, gesturing broadly through the windshield, “all of this was agricultural. I came here hunting rabbits.” San Pedro is built out now. Its dominant typology is the single-family house, and its circulation patterns exist to serve cars, so it’s not unlike any late 20th-century North American suburb, except that it has an orthogonal grid instead of a dendritic street plan. Also, almost every property is enclosed within a high security wall. Gonzalez’s destination was the campus of the University of Monterrey (UDEM).

UDEM demarks San Pedro’s narrow western border, at a point where lateral ridges off the soaring Sierra Madre mountains pinch close to the Santa Catarina River. West of the campus, where the valley opens out a bit, a new suburb is being developed; land prices there have quadrupled in the past decade. When the university campus was first established in 1981, “it was in the country,” noted Gonzalez’s passenger, René Bihan, FASLA. “Now they are landlocked. They have no choice but to be smart about how they infill.” One of UDEM’s smart choices was to hire (more…)